For several reasons, it is important to track and manage expenses related to promotion of business concerning sales calls to actual and prospective customers. One common reason for doing so is to have a defensible basis for seeking reimbursement from another entity, e.g., a manufacturer or service provider. Another reason relates to compliance with regulatory provisions or state or federal law. For instance, in the pharmaceutical sector, expenses with health care professionals such as doctors can be subject to constraints including annual limits on marketing costs and certain categories of spending can be subject to prohibitions.
The management and tracking of these expenses is a non-trivial task, especially in situations in which multiple representatives of the same company make calls (e.g., sales calls) to the same person or professional group within a given reporting period. One way in which a representative can inadvertently exceed permitted limits or constraints is to allocate expenses relating to spending on a professional who has already had expenses so-allocated by another representative in the same compliance period. This can occur even when field representatives have exclusively assigned professionals, because a given professional can be visited by multiple representatives for a variety of reasons, including to have different lines of product or service explained, or simply because that professional is part of a group that is visited by several representative (e.g., health management organizations or pharmacies having multiple professionals).
Thus, there is a need for improvements relating to one or more of the acts of tracking, managing, and reporting expenses incurred by company representatives, including expenses relating to visits with health care professionals. The present invention addresses these and other needs.